In a new post to his blog Giorgio Sironi has a (more balanced) comparison of Java versus PHP that them on topics like how they handle typing and their execution models.

If you exclude C and its child C++, the most popular programming languages in the world are Java and PHP, which power most of the dynamic web. I have working experience with PHP and for academical purposes I am deepening my knowledge of Java, thus I'd like to point out similarities and key differences between these two languages. Every language has its pros and cons, so there's no absolute winner here.

He briefly covers their history, java's static versus PHP's dynamic typing, how they both handle objects, their execution plans and how easy they are to deploy when it comes to general applications.